Integrating community values in the design of a mobile application for parkour practitioners

The paper elaborates on the way in which groups understand parkour at a value-based level and the influence that this mentality has on the development of a mobile application. A special attention is given to the conflict which emerges between the parkour practitioners that want to make sure that the activity keeps its structure intact and the fact that the mere introduction of a mobile application will bring changes in the way that parkour trainings take place for the practitioners. The development of a mobile application is mainly done with the purpose of supporting and reinvigorating the practice, but this can also modify its structure. It is the fear for this modification of the activity’s structure that makes parkour practitioners be very critical and reject designs that do not perfectly conform to the standards that they use when defining the activity. The small sizes of the groups makes them especially vulnerable to influences and keeping the original values of parkour intact becomes a priority for them when accepting the involvement of mobile technology in their trainings. Conclusions are developed from the research deployed with the purpose of bringing design improvements for the Traveur mobile application targeted towards parkour practitioners. The research includes a wide variety of techniques organized in different steps and layered on different levels of interest. The conflict between keeping parkour values intact and designing for the parkour community came up during the process of gaining knowledge on the phenomenon and finding a design which complies with standards of a commercial launch.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:sh-19348
Date January 2013
CreatorsBalan, Elena
PublisherSödertörns högskola, Institutionen för naturvetenskap, miljö och teknik
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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